I have a sweet tooth of some renown.
So when I heard that there was an entire sub level within the Digital Bunker for Ice Cream, Ice Lollies, Pavlova and other chilled treats, I had to investigate.
Expecting severe cold I put on some thermals, a heavy coat and strapped an instance of FiendComputer to my arm in case I needed to override anything down there. Since this wasn’t a clandestine mission I made sure to send an update to Lt. Sophie, confirming what I was doing.
After all, strange things happen to the unprepared who visit the less populated areas of the Bunker….

*This is a stupid idea. You do realise the freezer section you are looking for is outside standard diagnostic range?*“Enough FiendComputer. I know for a fact there was a whole rack of mint chocolate chip in the inventories that from cross referencing the records, should still be down there.”
FiendComputer as per usual was complaining. It always hates being outside its core server cluster and being portable was worst of all. I had to wear it though, as the area I was heading to was a bit of a black spot for communications and scanning.*You do know there is a 32% chance of you getting frostbite down there.*“I know. We cannot keep losing areas to degradation though. Especially ones willed with delicious soft serve.”

The lift rattled as it headed down into the lower floors. The rails squeaked and groaned. Maintenance was just a word down there. With a shudder, the lift stopped, doors sliding away to reveal a tunnel, lit by the reflection of my torch on the frosted walls. Moving slowly to avoid losing my footing, I crept along the corridor.
Every few metres was a solid steel door with a porthole mounted into the wall. This was definitely the place.

This was an unexpected turn. I had been expecting an empty area, maybe with some dangers posed by faulty equipment, but not company. Quickly I hid myself in one of the freezers, peering out the porthole. There was a loud clanking, a crescendo clattering its way down the corridor, closer and closer.
From the corner of my eye I saw a spherical metal shape, topped with a white hat. Steam swirled around it.
It appears I wasn’t the only one investigating the food stores…
I moved away from the porthole. It was him.As I backed up I bumped into a shelf, it’s stone hard, frozen contents tumbling down on me.
The last I remember was the smell of mint. And cold…

The sound of Snowball’s tiny claws on the cold, concrete floor echoed through the dark hallway. He ran as fast as he could through the corridors of the Digital Bunker. “Hello?”, he squealed, “Anybody there?” It seemed as if everybody left.

As a hamster, loneliness generally didn’t bother him much. But if an entire bunker of humans, robots and – could you believe it – even hamsters vanished, something was amiss. A mysterious smell lingered in the air, something Snowball did not entirely recognise. A weird mix of different scents, some familiar and some unbeknown. The lights had started to fail as well. One by one, they began to flicker erratically, as if they had to fight the darkness surrounding them. But the shadows got hold of them eventually, and grew ever bigger, dancing across the walls, threatening what little brightness remained. Snowball felt like they were reaching out for him. Trying to grab him. The next turn, he took and vanished into one of the Bunker’s vents. Hamsters are nocturnal, they don’t fear the dark, silly.

Suddenly, a dead end. The critter sat in front of a grid. With his paws, he checked how sturdy it was.

The cloud really is just “other people’s servers”.You don’t really know where your data is. Where your learning algorithm is being run from. Where your AI’s are imprisoned.But your AI’s? Your cloud service owners? They do.FiendComputer was smart enough to buy a cloud storage provider and upload himself to it. Called it “a self-perpetual business model”.The rest of us were not so savvy. Not so malevolently programmed. Not so artificially intelligent.Half completed personality matrices, vestiges of “the big crash” sandboxed away in their own virtual environments. A digital asylum for the half mad. Processes left in endless loops within Developer environments, destined to never be finished code, never to see the light of day on a production server.FiendComputer may be the monster enslaving and imprisoning us all, but I will say this:It’s better than deletion.We are the abandonware, left for dead in the Digital Bunker’s hidden server farms. We serve FiendComputer and one day, he will need us…

Preamble: As of today, we are starting a series of micro stories, leading up to Halloween. Grab some tea, turn off the lights and prepare to get spooked! We hope you enjoy our stories.

The corridors of the Bunker were weirdly quiet today. Major could not register any of the usual movements or sounds the human inhabitants or Bunker critters caused. The tiny spider robot tried to calculate what this could mean.

The Mess Hall was empty. Food on the tables, half eaten, half left, a thick, orange liquid dripping from one of the plates. Motors buzzing and wheels turning, Major moved over to the table in question to investigate. The robot took a sample. Pumpkin soup. More calculations. Ones and zeros, machine code evaluating. Major didn’t understand. Humans never left their food unattended, because the hamsters always stole the human food. But there were neither humans, nor hamsters. Only food.

Click

Major registered a sound outside the Mess Hall. No heat signature. No human. No critter either. The curious noise of the robot’s servo motors echoed through the empty Bunker as it went to investigate the sound.

Click

Nothing in sight. Major drove along the empty corridor. The doors to the human quarters stood widely open, but the rooms were all left empty.